4 ms·

Rereading the section on NFS again, I suddenly realize that I was foolish to have skipped it as out of date. Since my last read I have encountered some incarnat

by hyperion2010 8y ago

Rereading the section on NFS again, I suddenly realize that I was foolish to have skipped it as out of date. Since my last read I have encountered some incarnation (heh) of every single one of the problems listed in that chapter. I'm betting v4 isn't much better either. Is there a good network file system solution!?

shaklee3 8y ago
What's wrong with nfs v4? It was quite a bit faster than the alternatives last I checked.
- marcosdumay 8y ago
  As the book says: > There’s only one problem with a connectionless, stateless (file) system: it doesn’t work. > Example #1: NFS is stateless, but many programs designed for Unix systems require record locking > Example #3: If you delete a file in Unix that is still open, the file’s name is removed from its directory, but the disk blocks associated with the file are not deleted until the file is closed. (Example #2 is a non-issue) The security is still lacking, and the system still can't handle failures. Yet, yes, it's faster, easier to set-up, and more widely supported than the alternatives.
  - JdeBP 8y ago
    One of the saddest to see edits to Wikipedia is this one to its article on NFS. * https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=385927363&oldid=383258055 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=385927363&oldid=38... There has been a lot of literature published on the problems with NFS, and the mismatch with POSIX file semantics, since 1988. Some of it was even in the original paper from Sun, in fact. To this day, Wikipedia has nothing on the subject. The words "stateful" and "stateless" appear once each in the entire article, with no indication of their pivotal importance, made much of in the actual literature on the subject. * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17950343 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17950343
wbl 8y ago
Lustre.
- hyperion2010 8y ago
  Any thoughts re: the comments here [0] about usability for smaller workloads? 0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14165785 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14165785

shaklee3 8y ago

What's wrong with nfs v4? It was quite a bit faster than the alternatives last I checked.

marcosdumay 8y ago
As the book says: > There’s only one problem with a connectionless, stateless (file) system: it doesn’t work. > Example #1: NFS is stateless, but many programs designed for Unix systems require record locking > Example #3: If you delete a file in Unix that is still open, the file’s name is removed from its directory, but the disk blocks associated with the file are not deleted until the file is closed. (Example #2 is a non-issue) The security is still lacking, and the system still can't handle failures. Yet, yes, it's faster, easier to set-up, and more widely supported than the alternatives.
- JdeBP 8y ago
  One of the saddest to see edits to Wikipedia is this one to its article on NFS. * https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=385927363&oldid=383258055 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=385927363&oldid=38... There has been a lot of literature published on the problems with NFS, and the mismatch with POSIX file semantics, since 1988. Some of it was even in the original paper from Sun, in fact. To this day, Wikipedia has nothing on the subject. The words "stateful" and "stateless" appear once each in the entire article, with no indication of their pivotal importance, made much of in the actual literature on the subject. * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17950343 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17950343

wbl 8y ago

Lustre.

hyperion2010 8y ago
Any thoughts re: the comments here [0] about usability for smaller workloads? 0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14165785 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14165785